Overview
- CME Group and CF Benchmarks began publishing the CME CF Crypto Market Index and the CME CF Emerging Crypto Index on August 31, 2026, and both feed live price readings roughly once per second.
- The Emerging Crypto Index explicitly excludes Bitcoin and Ether while the Crypto Market Index includes them, and both draw constituents from CF Benchmarks’ CF Investible Universe under a free-float market-cap weighting rule.
- CF Benchmarks ran testing the week before launch and will administer the indices under UK Financial Conduct Authority oversight with formal constituent reviews scheduled each June and December.
- CF’s August research showed the Emerging index could be highly concentrated—four tokens accounted for 92.7% of an illustrative research portfolio—which means excluding BTC and ETH may still leave the index dominated by a handful of large altcoins.
- At launch the indices are measurement tools only: they do not settle CME futures or options and no ETF, fund, or token purchases accompanied the rollout, though both benchmarks are available for licensing and the December review and first live constituent file will show how weights behave in practice.